Kid Congo Powers looks back on his rock-and-roll journey
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The list of proper guitar heroes, those six-string shredders who play solos with their teeth while their groins are busy looking good in leather, is a short one these days. And not just because Eddie Van Halen and B.B. King are both dead, and Eric Clapton’s reputation as a jerk has finally outpaced his reputation as God’s White blues representative on earth. Guitar music simply doesn’t hold the cultural space it once did; being extremely good at playing the guitar is about as culturally relevant as being the world’s greatest telephone landline installer.
One interesting aspect of this development is that as less attention is paid to guitar heroes, it can help us redefine what it means to be one. If we let go of nostalgia and its stranglehold and embrace an alternate timeline where Sonny Sharrock is as important as Jimmy Page, where Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster is the one on posters in Guitar Center, then the list is longer and more representative of the possibilities of sound a guitar can hold. And to that list you might add Kid Congo Powers, a self-described “queer man, Mexican American, Chicano, self-taught, self possessed weirdo” who calls his own playing “an expressionistic blob of sound.”
He’s the guitarist who gave the Cramps’ “New Kind of Kick” its psychedelic siren coda, who co-founded post-punk cult favorites the Gun Club and who played on Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds two late-‘80s gloom-grandeur classics “Tender Prey” and “The Good Son.” Stories of those bands and more are covered in his new memoir, “Some New Kind of Kick,” a whirlwind of discovery and debauchery that is so loaded with iconic scenes and scenesters that it might feel name-droppy if its author didn’t treat his fellow freaks with the same unbridled affection he shows for his more notorious peers.
“I definitely have a very healthy ego, and at the time even more so,” Powers said in a recent interview. “But I also came from being a young fan, and I understood that always. That’s what I always felt like I was, and I still am. Not young, but a young fan inside.”
Born Brian Tristan in La Puente, Calif., in 1959, Kid Congo is what most people would call a “musician’s musician.” If his work and persona are less well-known to the general public, he’s a borderline legend to any artist who has ever tried to fit a mile teased high of jet black hair underneath a cowboy hat. Over the last four decades, the guitarist has, as both sideman and frontman of his own group the Pink Monkey Birds, achieved notoriety as a stylish purveyor of noirish and gritty bonhomie, and amassed an impressive circle of influences (Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Jack White among them) based on his texturally inventive but rarely indirect playing.
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